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Monday, December 22, 2014

The nationwide assault on tenure has found a beachhead, it seems, at community colleges.
Of course, not all two-year colleges and systems have traditionally
offered tenure. But even among those that have, the practice is now
under attack. Consider the situation in three Southern states.
Recently, the chancellor of the Alabama community-college system
resigned amid charges from faculty groups that he was seeking to end the
practice of awarding tenure there.
In Kentucky, the situation is even more serious. Up until about 10
years ago, the state's community colleges were part of the University of
Kentucky system, and professors could earn tenure in that system. Then
the two-year campuses were merged with the state's technical colleges to
create the Kentucky Community and Technical College System. Recently,
its Board of Trustees voted to abolish tenure for new hires, although it
didn't revoke tenure for those who already have it.

It’s unclear precisely when the term "adjunctification" was borne. It’s mentioned as far back as 2000 in articles about the job market
in the humanities. Linda Collins used the phrase in a speech in 2002
when she was president of the California Community Colleges’ Academic
Senate. Since then, the condition she so succinctly described—academe’s
overreliance on adjunct faculty members, especially at two-year
colleges—has only gotten worse. More than half of all U.S. faculty
members now hold part-time, contingent appointments.
That situation and what to do about it have become frequent topics of conversation in The Chronicle
and elsewhere. Having followed the discussion closely, and having dealt
directly with part-time faculty members for many years as a former
department chair and academic dean (not to mention being a former
part-timer myself), I’ve concluded that there is no single solution.
Perhaps we can take steps to alleviate it over time, but only if we come
to fully comprehend its various nuances.

Supervisors have various strategies
to try to put stewards off, trip you up, or get around the contract.

There’s no one-size-fits-all
strategy for dealing with difficult supervisors. But being prepared can help
you feel more confident, be more effective, and avoid getting caught off guard.

Before approaching the supervisor,
write down the relevant facts and keep your goal in mind. What is the problem?
What is the remedy you want? What is a reasonable timeline for getting the
problem resolved?

Before a hearing, prepare enough so
you’re comfortable presenting your case and can back it up with copies of the
contract language, supporting documentation, witness testimony, and other
relevant facts.

Supervisors have various strategies to try to put stewards off, trip you up, or get around the contract.
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for dealing with difficult
supervisors. But being prepared can help you feel more confident, be
more effective, and avoid getting caught off guard.
Before approaching the supervisor, write down the relevant facts and
keep your goal in mind. What is the problem? What is the remedy you
want? What is a reasonable timeline for getting the problem resolved?
Before a hearing, prepare enough so you’re comfortable presenting
your case and can back it up with copies of the contract language,
supporting documentation, witness testimony, and other relevant facts.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2014/12/dealing-difficult-supervisors#sthash.Zw0OjqOF.dpuf

University of Iowa officials are defending their decision to reassign
an employee who is suing over claims that she suffered employment
discrimination because of her conservative views.The university
transferred Teresa Wagner, a Republican, from her eight-year job as
associate director of the law school's writing center to a position in
the main library's unit that preserves special collections.
State
lawyers last month petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss Wagner's
lawsuit, which claims she was passed over for law school faculty jobs
because liberal professors objected to her prior work for groups that
oppose abortion rights. If the court doesn't intervene, a second trial
is scheduled for March after a prior case ended in mistrial.

A professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee has been suspended
after he publicly chastised a teaching assistant on his blog for
discouraging a discussion in her classroom regarding gay rights, the
school said on Wednesday.Political science
professor John McAdams was suspended with pay from his faculty and
teaching duties at the Catholic university and barred from being on
campus during the school's investigation, according to university
spokesman Brian Dorrington.The controversy began on Nov. 9 when McAdams criticized philosophy class instructor Cheryl Abbate on his blog.According
to McAdams, the instructor challenged a student's opposition to gay
rights and told the student "homophobic comments" would not be allowed
in the class. She also suggested the student drop the class if he did
not like it, according to McAdams.McAdams wrote Abbate was using a liberal tactic to dismiss any opinion that does not fit into their views.

Pacific Lutheran University argued that SEIU should be prevented from
organizing a collective bargaining unit for adjunct faculty at the
institution for two reasons: the faculty promote the religious mission
of the university and the faculty have managerial rights as described in
the “Yeshiva” decision. On both counts, the NLRB (with one member
providing a dissenting opinion) found that the university had made an
insufficient case.

Three
years ago, Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College
in Queens, had a student who passed an entire semester without speaking
in class. Like many others, the student, Mike Rifino, had come to
LaGuardia requiring remedial instruction.

But
the following semester Mr. Rifino turned up in Dr. Vianna’s
developmental psychology course. This time he took a seat closer to the
front of the room. Taking that as a positive sign, Dr. Vianna asked him
to join a weekly discussion group for students who might want to talk
about big ideas in economics, education and politics, subjects that
might cultivate a sense of intellectual curiosity and self-understanding
among students whose backgrounds typically left them lacking in either.

“The
group met on Friday afternoons,” Dr. Vianna said, “and Mike’s friends
were asking him why he was wasting his time; the students who came
weren’t getting any credit.”

The National Labor Relations Board has handed contingent faculty
members at Pacific Lutheran University a major win in their bid to form a
labor union, rejecting the university’s assertion that, as a religious
institution, it is exempt from the NLRB’s jurisdiction.
The board’s decision
is also significant because it refines the NLRB’s standard that is used
to determine whether certain faculty members can be considered
managerial employees and therefore denied union representation.
That question was at the heart of a landmark 1980 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University (444 U.S. 672), which has since essentially barred full-time faculty members at private colleges from forming unions.
A regional official of the NLRB ruled last year
that adjuncts at Pacific Lutheran could move to unionize. The full
labor board later agreed to review the case, and in February, it solicited input on both of the questions that were central to the dispute.

The National Labor Relations Board has made it easier for faculty
members at religious colleges—and private colleges as a whole—to
unionize.
In a 3-to-2 decision
last week involving contingent faculty members at Pacific Lutheran
University, the board laid out new standards for deciding two of the
most-divisive questions in academic-labor law: whether a college’s
religious nature should exempt it from NLRB jurisdiction, and whether
faculty members have too much involvement in the management of their
colleges to be considered as employees eligible for union
representation.
A regional official of the NLRB ruled last year
that adjuncts at Pacific Lutheran could move to unionize. The full
labor board later agreed to review the case, and in February it solicited input on both of the questions that were central to the dispute.

The National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling last week that could
clear the way for much more unionization of faculty members at private
colleges and universities.
The ruling rejected the claims of Pacific Lutheran University that its
full-time, non-tenure track faculty members are managerial employees and
thus are not entitled to collective bargaining. In doing so, the NLRB
offered a set of standards for evaluating whether faculty members are
managerial as described by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1980 ruling in
NLRB v. Yeshiva University, a decision that has largely made
unionization impossible for tenure-track faculty members at private
colleges and universities.
Last week's NLRB ruling suggested tools for evaluating whether private
college faculty members have enough power to be considered managerial,
and the standards set appear likely to be used by unions to say that
faculty members at many private colleges -- even those on the tenure
track -- aren't managerial, and are thus entitled to unionize.

Friday, December 19, 2014

What are professors allowed to say? Where are we are allowed to say it?
Last week Deborah O’Connor, a senior lecturer at Florida State University, was pushed to resign after making racist and homophobic comments on a publicFacebook
page. She said some pretty horrible things, like blaming Europe’s
troubles on “rodent Muslims.” She also told a well-known gay hairstylist
to “Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your ass. ”
I am revolted by her remarks. However, I spent quite a lot of the fall arguing that impassionedpolitical speech on a personal social-media account did not justify the “de-hiring” of Steven Salaita.
As has been well reported, Salaita was hired for a tenured position at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when stories about his
angry tweets regarding the war in Gaza reached the trustees and
chancellor of the university. They canceled his appointment. Every time I
encountered someone justifying Salaita’s firing by emphasizing what
they considered the gross anti-Semitism of his tweets, I responded with
the following: If we do not stand on principle for people with whom we
disagree, we have no principles.

The Education Department’s “framework”
for its college-ratings plan is surprisingly tentative, filled with
verbs like “exploring” and “considering.” It can be seen as a smart
move: Kick the ratings can down the road, telegraph what might be
coming, get more stakeholder involvement, and so on. But it can also be
seen as an OMG moment: After so much effort, so many meetings, and so
much chatter, there remain far too many questions unanswered and far too
many ratings criteria ill-defined.
The department is considering three categories of variables: access,
affordability, and student success. The department has a long history
measuring access. So it’s no surprise that the access variables are the
best developed. The calculations are mostly straightforward (e.g.,
percentage of students receiving Pell Grants has been reported for a
long time; first-generation college status can be calculated directly
from FAFSA), and the “considering” and “exploring” verbs appear only
once (in a discussion about family contribution).

After reading about specifications grading in this article and then interviewing Linda Nilson about her book on the subject,
I read Linda’s book over the holiday break. It’s causing a chain
reaction in my mind about how I view and assess student work that
expands outward into how I think about teaching and learning on a
fundamental level.
Whether or not you’re on board with the idea of specifications
grading, Linda’s book is a challenge to re-think the fundamental
assumptions we in academia often make about assessment and grading. For
me, there were four things that were very clear to me after reading the
book that were only partially clear before.

Full-time professors at several Boston-area private
colleges are taking steps to unionize, joining a growing number of their
part-time colleagues who have organized to seek higher pay and better
work conditions.
The latest effort involves instructors and
lecturers who are not on track to receive tenure, which is generally
considered a permanent position, and represents the latest development
in the national faculty-unionization movement launched a year and a half
ago.
Full-time lecturers at Tufts University filed paperwork this month
with the federal agency that oversees unionization votes. The lecturers
requested that a formal vote be conducted soon for the school’s 90 or so
full-time, nontenure-track faculty to decide whether to unionize.

The National Labor Relations Board recently issued a decision
significantly expanding the right of employees to use their employers'
e-mail systems for union organizing and other activities protected by
Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. The decision is available
at http://mynlrb.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d45819e22c9.
In Purple Communications the board explained that “the use
of email as a common form of workplace communication has expanded
dramatically in ecent years.” Therefore the board ruled that
“employee use of email for statutorily protected communications on
nonworking time must presumptively be permitted by employers who have
chosen to give employees access to their email systems.” While the case
addressed communications supporting the union during an organizing
drive, given the board's expansion of protected activity, this also
includes communications critical of the employer's employment-related
policies, practices and management decisions.

In
a report released Friday, the Obama administration offered its first
public glimpse of a planned system for rating how well colleges perform,
saying it wanted to group schools into three broad categories — good,
bad and somewhere between.

In detailing what elements the system is likely to contain, the Department of Education
also revealed how dauntingly complex the project has been, and how it
continues to be hampered by the limitations of the data available.

The department labeled what the Friday release
calls a “draft framework,” much of it subject to change, with a lot of
work still to be done before it produces a first version of an actual
rating formula. Officials said that first system should become public
before the start of the next school year, about eight months away, but
even then, it will remain a work in progress, to be upgraded as problems
arise and better data become available.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty keep writing anti-adjunct essays, and TheChronicle
keeps publishing them. I won't comment on the choices of that
particular news source. Instead, I'll recommend you check out the
#ChronicleFail hashtag on twitter. The latest in these attempts
to get adjuncts activists to just shut up and accept their working
conditions comes from Rob Jenkins. He actually writes, “For one thing,
adjunct teaching provides jobs for thousands of people. Not the best
jobs with the best pay, true, but paying jobs nonetheless.” This, hot
on the heels of Arizona State's English department deciding to increase
adjunct faculty loads from 4/4 to 5/5 with no change in pay. (Have you
signed the petition
rallying against that move?) Administrators and tenured faculty alike
regularly defend actions and attitudes like these, citing everything
from budget constraints to “meritocracy.” I find the “but it's a job”
argument particularly offensive, as it suggests that workers have no
right to question the workplace. Without critique of working conditions,
we'd have no weekend, no safety regulations, and no child labor laws.

It seems to be a common bit of wisdom that small classes with limited
enrollments such as first year composition, or other general education
courses, are not money makers[1].
We’re told it’s the large lectures, built on the 600-1000 person
“sage on a stage” model, that are supporting these smaller undergraduate
courses.
While these large lectures may be “profitable[2],” so are the smaller enrollment general education classes at universities that rely on non-tenure-track labor.
I’ve been writing about
Arizona State the past couple days, but this is not an Arizona State
phenomenon. This is something that is shared at any university that
makes significant use of low paid, nontenurable instructors. Given that ¾
of all instructional faculty fit this designation, this is obviously
true in many places.

The University of Michigan affirmed its commitment to faculty free
speech as well as what it called a “respectful environment,” following
calls from conservatives that it condemn the professor who wrote an
essay called “It’s OK to Hate Republicans,” The Detroit News
reported. The essay, by Susan J. Douglas, the chair and Catherine
Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies, was published online
this week by In These Times. “I hate Republicans,” Douglas wrote.
“I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years
watching [Republican legislators] Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted
Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying
climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal
‘personhood.’”
Following the essay’s publication, Andrea Fischer Newman, a member of
the university’s Board of Regents, wrote on her Facebook page that the
essay was “extremely troubling and offensive,” and “ill-serves the most
basic values of a university community.” Bobby Schostak, chairman of the
Michigan Republican Party said in a statement that the essay was “ugly
and full of hatred” and intimidating to students. He said the university
and state Democrats should “join in condemning this disgraceful
dialogue by calling for Professor Susan J. Douglas’ resignation.”

Universities should have a “proper dialogue” with Ph.D. students from
the start about the fact that they are “not walking into a job for
life.”
That is the view of Dame Athene Donald, head of a Royal Society
working group that has published new guidelines about doctoral candidate
development.Donald said the guidelines give a “clear statement” about the role of
universities in managing the expectations of junior scientists at a time
when competition for academic jobs has never been fiercer. Students
should also take responsibility for establishing and managing their own
career expectations, according to the document, "Doctoral Students’
Career Expectations: Principles and Responsibilities."

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Trigger warning policies in college classrooms have been controversial since their inception,
with advocates saying they protect students who have had traumatic
experiences – primarily sexual assault – from having to relive them as
part of their education. Opponents, meanwhile, have argued that trigger
warning policies infringe on instructors’ academic freedom and deny
students one of the hallmarks of a college education: being made to feel
intellectually uncomfortable at times.
That conversation has now reached law schools, based on an essay by
Jeannie Suk, a professor of law at Harvard University, that was recently
published by The New Yorker.
In her piece, called “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law,”
Suk argues that increased anxiety among her students and colleagues
about discussing complicated sexual assault cases is impeding criminal
law professors’ ability to do their jobs well – ultimately at the
expense of students and the rape victims whom some of them will
eventually represent.

Collaborations between universities are nothing new, but several
factors are fostering more cooperative agreements between a number of
higher education institutions — even one-time rivals.
Technology advances, an increasing acceptance of online learning,
financial pressures, and international ambitions have been the catalysts
for several recently announced joint projects between colleges and
universities. Here are seven of the more notable examples.

Yale & Harvard computer science class

Starting in the fall of 2015, Yale University will offer
an introductory computer-science class with live-streamed lectures from
Harvard University. Students from both campuses will take the same
tests and collaborate via computer and in person. Yale’s
computer-science department has scarce resources, so the partnership on
the popular, nearly-10-year-old course makes sense. A Yale
computer-science professor will teach the Yale side of the course,
adding material for both the Yale and Harvard students. Harvard also
plans to live-stream at least one Yale course.

Universities are stepping up efforts to create “spinouts,” or
business startups born from some of the cutting-edge research of their
students or faculty.
Some schools are creating funds that help
cover startup costs. Others are pairing scientists with entrepreneurs,
launching incubators, or programs to foster business development, and
even including entrepreneurial activity in their reviews of faculty.
The
moves come as universities face heightened pressure from trustees,
government officials and others to demonstrate the value of academic
research. Universities and other research institutions created 818
startups in fiscal 2013, up from 705 in 2012 and 670 in 2011, according
to the Association of University Technology Managers, a trade group.
Universities often receive a royalty or licensing fee from such ventures
and in many cases an equity stake, typically 5% to 10% of the new
company.

Dear Kerry Ann,
The recent political events in Ferguson (and beyond) have me
consumed with injustice in the world. I'm located in an isolated
location (there are no actual protests in my area) so I'm spending
enormous amounts of time on Facebook and Twitter re-posting news,
fighting with "friends" I've only recently learned hold racist views,
and watching all things protest on TV. I have no energy for my work and
fighting for justice feels like an immediate need (or at least way more
important than the boring article I'm writing). But I'm not meeting the
expectations my department has for publishing my research and I have a
third-year review looming. Spending time on my writing feels privileged,
careerist and positively decadent when other people are protesting in
the streets.
What should I do?
Passionate (But Not Productive) Assistant Professor

Marquette University has suspended with pay and barred from campus
the tenured professor who criticized a graduate student instructor in a
personal blog, pending an investigation into his conduct.
John McAdams, an associate professor of political science at Marquette, last month wrote a controversial
blog post accusing a teaching assistant in philosophy of shutting down a
classroom conversation on gay marriage based on her own political
beliefs. He based the post on a recording secretly made by a
disgruntled student who wished that the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, had
spent more time on the topic of gay marriage, which the student opposed.
McAdams said Abbate, in not allowing a prolonged conversation about gay
marriage, was “using a tactic typical among liberals,” in which
opinions they disagree with “are not merely wrong, and are not to be
argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to
be shut up.”

A huge prayer rally, with Gov. Bobby Jindal as host and a
controversial Christian group as sponsor, is set to take place next
month at an arena at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge, and a
faculty leader is questioning whether that’s an appropriate use of a
public higher-education facility, The Times-Picayune reports.
Kevin L. Cope, president of the Faculty Senate at LSU, told the New
Orleans newspaper that the senate would not meet in time to try to push
the January 24 event off campus, but he said it would consider asking
the university to put more restrictions on the use of campus facilities.
The resolution would require that facilities host only events that
“advance the mission of the university,” he said.

An associate professor at Marquette University says he has been
suspended with pay for publicly criticizing how a teaching assistant
handled the topic of gay marriage in a class discussion, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelreports.
Last month a student in the teaching assistant’s class confronted her
for not allowing more discussion of whether a ban on gay marriage
violated the philosopher John Rawls’s equal-liberty principle, after
another student suggested it did. The student recorded the conversation,
which was reported on by Inside Higher Ed.
It was also the subject of a post on the conservative-leaning blog
of a political-science professor, John McAdams. Mr. McAdams said the
teaching assistant, Cheryl Abbate, had limited free speech by “using a
tactic typical among liberals now.”

The chair of the communications department at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor is under fire, reports the Detroit Free Press, for a blog post she wrote that begins as follows:
“I hate Republicans. I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the
next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz,
Darrell Issa, or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate
change, thwarting immigration reform, or championing fetal
‘personhood.’”
The essay by Susan J. Douglas, which appears to have been removed from the website of the magazine In These Times, has drawn the ire of prominent Republicans, including a university regent, Andrea Fischer Newman.
“The University of Michigan community rightly supports and defends a
wide variety of viewpoints and a diversity of opinion on all subjects,”
Ms. Newman wrote in a Facebook post, according to the Free Press.
“But this particular column, which expresses and condones hatred toward
an entire segment of individuals in our society based solely on their
political views, fails to observe an equally important value of our
university—respect for the right of others to hold views contrary to our
own.”

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

After a full day of teaching at Boston College, Karen Arnold had to
find time to read her students’ contributions to an online discussion
board. Each was required to write at least one post, and, as usual, they
seemed to have waited to do it until the night before the deadline.
“They would just blather something,” said Arnold, who teaches higher
education and educational administration. “They didn’t have a
conversation. It was more like a hoop-jumping exercise.”
That was around 2008, and Arnold has avoided assigning online discussions ever since.
Like other faculty nationwide with memories of failed experiments such
as these, she’s pushing back against the widespread notion that
technology can necessarily improve teaching and cut costs.
“We are fooling ourselves that we’re getting more efficient,” she said.

In a decision that could affect millions of workers across the country, the National Labor Relations Board
ruled on Thursday that employers could not prohibit employees from
using their company’s email to communicate and engage in union
organizing on their own time.

The 3-to-2 ruling overturned a decision made in 2007, when Republicans held a majority on the board, that had forbidden such use of email.

Calling
that ruling “clearly incorrect,” the current majority noted how
technology had transformed daily habits. “The workplace is ‘uniquely
appropriate’ and ‘the natural gathering place’ for such communications,”
the board wrote, “and the use of email as a common form of workplace
communication has expanded dramatically in recent years.”

The
board did carve out an exception, saying that in special circumstances,
employers might be able to create an overall ban on nonwork use of
email if they could show it was necessary for productivity or
discipline. The board said that as long as workers were allowed to send
non-work-related emails, then employers could not bar the messages from
being about union organizing.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the most infamous academic-labor study of all time, "Prospects for the Faculty in Arts and Sciences."
The study, led by William Bowen, then president of Princeton
University, set itself the task of projecting "demand and supply" for
faculty a full quarter-century into the future—forecasting the so-called
job market right up into our present decade.
Contrary to the widespread knowledge of permanent retrenchment and
adjunctification, the study projected that a huge "undersupply" of
people holding doctoral degrees would manifest by 1997. However, nothing
of the kind transpired. In reality, the perma-temping of the faculty
continued on the same steeply upward trend line as before.
The Bowen study’s misreading of the future raises two questions. What
was wrong with the assumptions guiding it? And why did an effort with
so many flaws receive such an uncritical greeting? The answers remain
surprisingly relevant.
- See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/The-Job-Market-That-Is/150841/#sthash.EByc2MUV.dpuf

This year marked the 25th
anniversary of the most infamous academic-labor study of all time, "Prospects for the Faculty in Arts and Sciences."
The study, led by William Bowen, then president of Princeton University, set
itself the task of projecting "demand and supply" for faculty a full
quarter-century into the future—forecasting the so-called job market right up
into our present decade.

Contrary to the widespread knowledge
of permanent retrenchment and adjunctification, the study projected that a huge
"undersupply" of people holding doctoral degrees would manifest by
1997. However, nothing of the kind transpired. In reality, the perma-temping of
the faculty continued on the same steeply upward trend line as before.

The Bowen study’s misreading of the
future raises two questions. What was wrong with the assumptions guiding it?
And why did an effort with so many flaws receive such an uncritical greeting?
The answers remain surprisingly relevant.

American higher education today looks nothing like it did a few
generations ago, let alone at the founding of the country. A new book, The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture From the Founding to World War II
(Princeton University Press), explores how colleges evolved. The author
is Roger L. Geiger, who is distinguished professor of higher education
at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth and Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace.
He responded via email to questions about his new book.

When it comes to first-year writing courses, how many sections are
too many for one instructor to teach? Full-time, non-tenure-track
faculty members at Arizona State University say five per semester, and
they’re protesting their department’s plan to increase their teaching
load to that number (up from four) each term, starting next fall. They
say they’re worried the service work they’ll give up in exchange for the
extra course won’t be taken up by tenure-line faculty, and that they
won’t be able to give needy students the same level of attention.
In effect, the university has just increased instructors' teaching
workload by 25 percent, without offering an extra dollar for the effort.
Faculty advocates agree that the planned course load is too much, and
that it’s another example of an institution asking some of its most
vulnerable faculty members to do more with less.
Arizona State, meanwhile, says the change is necessary to address a budget shortfall.

Higher ed’s reliance on adjunct faculty, hardly a secret anymore, has gotten much scrutiny in the past few years.

Institutions of all types benefit from the fact that adjuncts—provided
they don’t become eligible for health benefits by working more than 30
hours a week—can be employed for a fraction of the investment needed for
full-time faculty. In fact, many schools now include a large contingent
of part-time faculty as routine business practice.

The number of adjuncts employed nationwide has
increased by more than 160 percent over the past two decades, according
to the U.S. Department of Education. At the same time, colleges face
growing concerns that the needs of adjuncts, as well as their potential
to contribute more fully to student success, are being overlooked.

A tenured professor who was fired from his job at the College of the
Mainland after years of clashing with the administration has settled a
lawsuit against the Texas institution, the Houston Chronicle reported. Neither side disclosed the terms of the settlement.
The professor, David Michael Smith, had accused the college of
retaliating against him for filing two previous free-speech lawsuits and
helping colleagues challenge the administration’s actions. The college
said he had been dismissed for insubordination and for harassing his peers.
Mr. Smith told the newspaper he was “certain” there would be
additional lawsuits unless the administration was more willing to work
with employees and students. Beth Lewis, the college’s president, said
there was “no merit” to Mr. Smith’s assertion that the administration
did not tolerate dissent.

Their relationships are often characterized by skepticism, mistrust, or, in the worst cases, outright antagonism.
The
divide between administrators and professors is legendary in higher
education, where the model of shared governance seems to fuel tensions
as often as it resolves them.
Does some of the problem boil down to simple misunderstandings, or a lack of understanding? Could training help?
That’s
the idea behind an annual institute for rising faculty leaders started
by Richard A. Detweiler, president of the Great Lakes Colleges
Association and president emeritus of Hartwick College. Over a weekend,
more than two dozen professors from the 13 small private colleges that
make up the association attend a workshop designed to educate them about
how their institutions run and what it is like to lead them. Now in its
ninth year, the Academic Leadership and Innovation Institute includes
briefings about how various stakeholders, including students, donors,
and trustees, view a college. The participants compare their colleges’
concerns. And they go through exercises designed to better their
negotiation skills so they can help their colleagues back home find
common ground, whether in departmental turf wars or institutionwide
crises.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Though it may not feel like it when you see the latest
identity-affirming listicle shared by a friend on Facebook, we are a
society moving toward evidence. Our world is ever more quantified, and
with such data, flawed or not, the tools of science are more widely
applied to our decisions. We can do more than observe our lives, the
idea goes. We can experiment on them.
No group lives that ethos more than the life-hacking coders of
Silicon Valley. Trading on Internet-wired products that allow continuous
updates and monitoring, programmers test their software while we use
it, comparing one algorithmic tweak against another—the A/B test, as
it’s known. As we browse the web, we are exposed to endless
manipulations. Many are banal—what font gets you to click more?—and some
are not.

Union advocates applauded two decisions by the National Labor
Relations Board last week, one of which protects the right of employees
using work email for union communications. The other decision revises
rules for union elections and could shorten the union election process.
In the first case, that of Purple Communications and Communications Workers of America,
the board ruled that employees communicating with each other on work
computers – but not on work time – are free to discuss union activity.
The decision did not address communication with non-employees, however.
Aaron Nisenson, chief counsel for the American Association of
University Professors, said via email that the decision as it pertains
to higher education has particular relevance to faculty members, who
frequently communicate via email. “The ability to use email to
communicate is essential to faculty, particularly contingent faculty,
who are often dispersed and may not be able to speak directly to each
other regularly,” he added.

Greetings, fellow Duck readers. I realize I’ve been MIA
this semester – DGS duties and ISA-Midwest stuff took too much of my
non-research time. Another factor in my absence, however: a Monday
Wednesday Friday schedule. And, it sucked.[1] Like
large-tornado-near-my-hometown sucked. Today marks the last Friday
class of the semester – thank god.[2] Even though I should be getting
back to research this morning, I wanted to write a little bit about why I
think 50 minute/3 day a week classes should be banned in our
discipline.

Let’s take a lesson from the educators: longer class periods
that do not meet as often have some advantages for climate and
learning.

My significant other, who teaches middle school science, has taught
in schools where class periods are 40, 50, and 90 minutes in length.
And, my SO’s preference is strongly for longer class periods. This
preference is in line with a lot of the peer-reviewed research on block
scheduling (one of the ways where students have longer class periods
that do not meet as often in secondary schools). Zepeda and Mayers (2006) reviewed
58 previous academic studies on the issue and, although they find very
inconsistent results across the studies, they do find that there were
improvements in “student grade point averages” and “school climate” when
students were on block schedules. Queen (2008)’s handbook
on the topic also reviews the academic literature with a positive
take–away point for block scheduling. There are a lot of new
dissertations on the topic, however, with very different results across
disciplines. Although I’m not an expert on the topic, the logic that
longer class periods allow for more diversity in teaching techniques
makes a lot of intuitive sense.

In the stressful final days of a long and trying semester, Colgate
University professors wanted to spread some love. To get the message
across, they turned to a social media scene frequented by students but
foreign to many professors.
They set out to take back Yik Yak by flooding the anonymous social media app with happy thoughts.
Yik Yak -- like the many “confessions websites” before it -- is associated with campus-specific hateful comments and cyber bullying.
“It started there, and we wanted to end it there,” said Eddie Watkins, an associate professor of biology at Colgate.
Racist comments on Yik Yak were responsible in part for tensions at
Colgate in September that led a group of students to stage a multi-day
sit-in to protest the university’s lack of diversity.
Insulting -- and at times threatening -- comments reappeared on the
app's Colgate page (and elsewhere) in recent weeks as people across the
country have organized to protest grand jury decisions in the deaths of
Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police.

Colleges and universities with ties to Bill Cosby have in recent
weeks been distancing themselves from the embattled comedian. On Sunday,
Spelman College joined their ranks. The historically black women’s
college released a statement saying it was suspending the endowed professorship named for Mr. Cosby and his wife. The short statement reads:
“The William and Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Endowed Professorship was
established to bring positive attention and accomplished visiting
scholars to Spelman College in order to enhance our intellectual,
cultural, and creative life; however, the current context prevents us
from continuing to meet these objectives fully. Consequently, we will
suspend the program until such time that the original goals can again be
met.”
The professorship was established with a $20-million gift from Mr.
Cosby to the university in 1988. The comedian has been accused by at
least 20 women of sexual assault.